The redistributional impact of non-linear electricity pricing

The redistributional impact of non-linear ele ...
Severin Borenstein, Severin Bo ...
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Last edited by MARC Bot
September 25, 2020 | History

The redistributional impact of non-linear electricity pricing

"Utility regulators frequently focus as much or more on the distributional impact of electric rate structures as on their efficiency. The goal of protecting low-income consumers has become more central with recent increases in wholesale power costs and anticipation of significant costs of greenhouse gas emissions in the near future. These concerns have led to the widespread use of increasing-block pricing (IBP), under which the marginal price to the household increases as its daily or monthly usage rises. There is no cost basis for differentiating marginal price of electricity by consumption level, so perhaps nowhere is the conflict between efficiency and distributional goals greater than in the use of IBP. California has adopted some of the most steeply increasing-block tariffs in electric utility history. Combining household-level utility billing data with census data on income distribution by area, I derive estimates of the income redistribution effected by these increasing-block electricity tariffs. I find that the rate structure does redistribute income to lower-income groups, cutting the bills of households in the lowest income bracket by about 12% (about $5 per month). The effect would be about twice as large if not for the presence of another program that offers a different and lower rate structure to qualified low-income households. I find that the deadweight loss associated with IBP is likely to be large relative to the transfers. In contrast, I find that the means-tested program transfers income with much less economic inefficiency. A much larger share of the revenue redistributed by the IBP tariff, however, comes from the wealthiest quintile of households, so IBP may be a more progressive structure of redistribution. In carrying out the analysis, I also show that a common approach to studying (or controlling for) income distribution effects by using median household income within a census block group may substantially understate the potential effects"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

Publish Date
Language
English

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Cover of: The redistributional impact of non-linear electricity pricing
The redistributional impact of non-linear electricity pricing
2010, National Bureau of Economic Research
electronic resource / in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Title from PDF file as viewed on 3/23/2010.

Includes bibliographical references.

Also available in print.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Published in
Cambridge, MA
Series
NBER working paper series -- working paper 15822, Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 15822.

Classifications

Library of Congress
HB1

The Physical Object

Format
[electronic resource] /

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL30508313M
LCCN
2010655777

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL22419523W

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